WA Friday Lunch Talks are monthly meetings with presentations of current research results or research in progress by WA faculty, staff, or PhD students. Each talk is of 30 minutes (+ 10 minutes for discussion).
Bartosz Wiland
Department of English-Polish Comparative Linguistics
Resolving ordering paradoxes in cross-categorial paradigms with declarative complementizers
Abstract:
Cross-linguistically attested syncretisms between the nominal declarative complementizer (COMP), the demonstrative pronoun (DEM), the interrogative pronoun ‘what’ (WH), and a relative pronoun (REL) suggest that these four categories form a paradigm, understood as an ordered set of related grammatical forms. The syncretic alignment between these categories suggests that they are grammatically contained as follows: DEM > COMP > REL > WH. Such an ordering is motivated by the premise that syncretism anchors structural containment since it only targets contiguous layers of a syntactic structure, a well-attested generalization known as *ABA. However, morphological containment of DEM in the structure of WH, REL, and COMP that we find in certain Slavic languages suggests an ordering where DEM is not the biggest but the smallest category in the sequence: COMP > REL > WH > DEM. I will argue that this paradox can be sorted out if we introduce a typology od demonstratives, a step that will turn out to be useful in resolving (an apparent) *ABA violation in a cross-categorial paradigm in Basaá (Bantu), a language which shows syncretism between the demonstrative and the relativizer to the exclusion of the declarative complementizer.
Kacper Łodzikowski and Mateusz Jekiel
Department of Older Germanic Languages
Board games for teaching English prosody to advanced EFL learners
Abstract:
This exploratory study fills the gap in research on using print board games to teach English prosody to advanced EFL learners at university level. We developed three in-class print-and-play board games that accompanied three prosody-related topics in a course in English phonetics and phonology at a Polish university. For those topics, compared to topics without any board games, learners reported higher in-class engagement and obtained higher post-class quiz scores. At the end of the course, learners rated board games as equally or more useful than some of the other teaching aids. While traditional printed worksheets were still rated as the most useful teaching aid, learners expressed their preference for using extra classroom time for playing board games instead of completing extra worksheet exercises. We hope these promising results encourage teachers to experiment with implementing these and other board games in their advanced curricula.